Twelve years of Contrarians goodness means it’s time to hand out awards again - and we are including the FIRF entries in this year’s line-up too! Listen as we hand out Embries, Hooeys, The Ruffalo, The Gad, and The Lancaster Dodd Grant for the Development of White People Movies!

It’s a tough spot, living in the shadow of the Scream franchise and, specifically, living in the shadow of Sydney Prescott. Not that Jennifer Love Hewitt didn’t do well by herself as a movie & TV star, but the Last Summer films do tend to get lost amid the other 90s slashers. So how does I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER fare when it’s judged on its own merits - if that’s even possible? Listen to this Real Talk segment to find out!

The best thing Scream did was initiate a rebirth of slasher movies. The worst thing Scream did was initiate a slasher market saturation - a saturation which is probably to blame for the poor critical reception I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER suffered. Listen to Alex & Julio as they do their best to vindicate an underrated sequel with as many musical numbers as killers in its story! Welcome back Jennifer Love Hewitt!

The Livestream for the Cure is back for their tenth installment and we will be participating with a two-hour block on Saturday, October 24th, from 1pm to 3pm CST. Join us and help us raise money for cancer research! There will be movie talk, re-enactments of scenes from the X-Men franchise, special appearances by Zoë and Jordan, and a lot more!

Check out www.livestreamforthecure.com for all the links. We’ll see you this Saturday!

The fourteenth installment of Fresh Immigrants, Rotten Fascists introduces us to Alejandro, a young immigrant from El Salvador in dire need of an American sponsor - a path that entangles him with… a Tilda Swinton character. PROBLEMISTA is written and directed by Julio Torres, the mind behind the Papyrus skit on SNL, so that should tell you everything you need to know.

Thank you for checking this new project out, whether you are a long-time Contrarians fan or someone who’s just trying to listen to people talking positively about immigrants and negatively about fascism. If you have any recommendations for future entries in the series, let us know!

You really get a lot of leeway when your movie is 75 minutes long - and when its leads have the chops and chemistry to carry a feature. TRANCERS isn’t high art, but does it need to be? And if we are positive about it, do we need to justify why we are harsher on more polished films? We discuss that and more on this Real Talk segment!

Imagine the hubris necessary to release a movie about a time-traveling hero sent back to the 80s to protect someone from a futuristic killer… the same year The Terminator came out. But TRANCERS doesn’t coast purely on hubris and riffs on better sci-fi movies - it also features a young Helen Hunt doing her best to make an impression and graduate to better films. Is that why Trancers is better on the Tomatometer? Listen to Alex & Julio try to figure out!

You’d think the joint forces of James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez would produce an unstoppable box office juggernaut - a franchise that would capture the world’s imagination for decades… but that didn’t turn out to be the case with ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL. Its devoted audience is still holding out hope for a sequel, and who knows, we may get one someday, when Cameron tires of Pandora. But until then, all we can do is try to figure out what went wrong. Let’s do that in this Real Talk segment!

From James Cameron, they said. From the mind behind Titanic and Avatar, they said. But Jimmy C couldn’t even be bothered to let the actual director of ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL, Robert Rodriguez, play with the kind of tech that makes Cameron flicks so visually impressive. So poor Alita had to settle for a direct-to-video Temu Pixar aesthetic and relied on the passionate fanbase from its manga origins to crawl to a fresh Tomatometer score. Listen to Alex & Julio as they wonder when Christoph Waltz became a cuddly old man!

The thirteenth installment of Fresh Immigrants, Rotten Fascists takes us to Chile, where infamous dictator Augusto Pinochet is revealed to be a vampire. Just another off-kilter biopic from Pablo Larrain, the man who brought us Jackie, Spencer, and now… EL CONDE.

Thank you for checking this new project out, whether you are a long-time Contrarians fan or someone who’s just trying to listen to people talking positively about immigrants and negatively about fascism. If you have any recommendations for future entries in the series, let us know!